Ressurect V/AT?

[Rick Richardson]

In article <196 at carpet.WLK.COM> bill at carpet.WLK.COM (Bill Kennedy) writes:
>         The median feeling seemed to be that $50 to
>enroll and $10-50/year to sustain is about right for this.

How about just organizing a mass purchase of cacheless, slow
memory, 1st generation 386 motherboards to replace the 286
mothers?  They ought to be dirt cheap.  Or maybe 386SX barnacle
boards for 286 mothers.  Then kiss the problems goodbye.
The catch is: will Interactive give the 75% deal on 386/ix
products to owners of uPort 286 products upgrading to 386es?

Failing that, another alternative is to find out if Venturcom
is still in the System V 286 UNIX market, and would give an
upgrade deal to uPort'ers.  Remember Venturcom? The first
PC UNIX vendor, and they recently got a shot in the arm from
the AT&T/Air Force deal for the Prelude database/spreadsheet package.

My V/AT is gathering dust in a corner (bought in '87, used 1 week).
I went back to Venix System V/286, from whence I started.
Venix has been fine for me for over three years now. No kernel
double panics. The stock serial driver is nothing to write home about,
but I did a little hack work to support the 16550A chips (feb '88) and
dial in/out.  The stock driver worked OK at 19.2, except when
you switched virtual terminals.  Since the console display driver was
shutting off interrupts too long during a vt switch, the only quick
fix was the hardware (16550A) one.

To drive the point home, "pcrat" does all of our comms and news, is a 286
with a Digiboard-4 (all parts are 16550A's), and runs Venix System V.
It only goes down when the power fails (last ones were XMAS, Feb 11,
and March 29).

In comparison, the 386 running 386/ix 1.0.6 would run stock serial ports
at up to 9600 without any trouble, but 19.2 was not 100% reliable.
Now, with 386/ix V.3.2, the stock ports can't do 9600 anymore.
I'd have scrapped the 286 long ago, but it does a dandy job handling
the comms, and I'm tired of fighting *that* problem.

-- 
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